Food
Granean food is generally light, low in fat, and high in sugar and salt. Fruit is used in both sweet and savory cuisine. Visitors to Granea have called the food here "Heavenly" and filled with flavor but reviewed the ingredients to be "Odd." Graneans eat three main meals a day: breakfast, dinner and supper. Between breakfast and dinner is a light snack called Mid-day. Evening drinks with light fare eaten a few hours after dinner are called Mid-eves. There are two staples in Granea. One is served steamed or boiled after husking, a type of rice with nearly spherical grains. The other is a sweet flatbread made with wheat flour, sugar cane, and cream. Both have seen a myriad of variations and a place at every meal. Breakfast Breakfast is a lengthy meal and should be made fresh. Preparations can begin as early as an hour before daybreak when a family is large. An average family keeps a basket of fresh fruit on the table at all times. At breakfast, fruit from this basket is sliced and either cooked into a rice porridge with honey or served raw. This porridge, called Aziz, is easy to digest and starts up the body's metabolism for the day. Alternatively, savory Aziz contain salted meat, shredded cheese, fried beans, fish, and minced vegetables. Dough would have been prepared from flour, yeast, cream, and sugar cane the night before. This flour is kept in a stone box, under a slab of cold stone, so it rises slowly overnight and does not over-rise. That dough is kneaded and rolled out into flat disks the size of hands. They cook rapidly on flat stone griddles along with thin slices of meat and cheese, then are rolled up and served with toppings like peppers and fruit chutney. This is called Krey. Variations of Krey use beans, fruits, sausages, fish, and other ingredients with some form of cheese. An alternative for Krey is a lightly baked, dense cake made of eggs, sugar, cream, and flour. Dolchen is cooked in a shallow dish and left half-raw so it is gooey at the center. This is commonly served with milk or melted cheese. Fresh fruit ends the meal, which usually lasts about an hour for a family of 4 to 6, 45 minutes for a family of 1 to 5. Visitors call this the tamest of the three main meals. Mid-Day Mid-Days are served directly between breakfast and dinner. Commonly, it is just fresh fruit or fresh fruit juices. Crackers with fruit salsa and cheese are popular at eating houses, taverns and inns. For the particularly hungry, there is Raseeir. To make Raseeir, mix lard with salted meat and sugar and pack it into rice that has soaked overnight. The lumps are stuffed into leaves, then steamed for an hour until fully cooked. These are filling and high in energy, fare favored by workers in physical labor. Dinner Dinner is the noon meal. At home, it is commonly one meat dish and one vegetable dish, served with fresh fruit and either rice or bread. Meat dishes are made from livestock, but also from snakes, rodents, slugs, sea urchins, fish, sea mammals, gulls and other wildlife. A Granean cook once said to foreign travellers at his eating-house, "If there was something that lived and breathed, it has probably seen a plate." Street vendors are extremely popular in cities and markets. They sell their fare for very cheap because they use mostly discarded parts of livestock bought from eating-houses that do not serve dishes based from organs. Skewers of roasted heart slices, tongues, intestines, kidneys, and more litter market streets from end to end. Stands that sell fish will keep their fish alive in barrels and buckets and gut them before a customer's eyes to reassure clients their food is fresh. The faster the fish is prepared, the fresher it is. Street cooks selling fish would scale fish clean while they are still alive and gut them only after salting and seasoning the outside. The same is done for eels. Stir-fried vegetables, sliced bull cooked with fruit, roasted squashes and popped grain are sold in paper cone cups and topped with chutney, salsa, honey, pickled shrimp, dried seaweed, roasted fruit puree and melted goat cheese. Graneans favor mildly spicy foods paired with cool compliments like soured cream kept in buckets of ice. Fried flatbread stuffed with ground meats and minced vegetables, called Taaka, were made popular by Wartime when it was the most delicious thing a soldier could bring from a city out into the field. After a speech made by a popular orator who anagolized Taaka to "the promise of home," those who could spare the time spend day and night making Taaka and served them to soldiers the day the left a village or town as good-luck gifts. Meat became more abundant after the war and the ratio of meat to vegetable in the filling has increased along with the overall bulk of the filling. Gutted birds stuffed with sticky rice are rolled in salted mud-clay with their feathers still on. Fuurskar, '''meaning fired bird, is as much a dish as it is a public spectacle. People watch as the clay-caked birds thrown into a firepit to bake inside the muddy shell. When they are cooked long enough, the bird balls are rolled out with a metal stick and cracked open. The feathers and skincome off with the baked clay, leaving the flesh underneath clean, whole, and well seasoned. Inside the bird, the sticky rice is saturated with the bird's drippings of fat and is called the true prize of the dish. Snakes are abundant in Granean jungles, to the point they are pests. Non-native venom snakes were smuggled over by the Freedom Faction during the war to be set on Alliance camps. These snakes escaped quickly into the wild, proliferated, and now endanger much of Granea's native rodent species. However, the snakes were found to be delicious steamed or fried or broiled, once their venom glands are removed. Hunters and trappers make good money from them and joke, "it's a gift from them Hurrons." '''Cipicarsh is fish eggs coated in salted and spiced blood. They are fried into little pats of and eaten between bread. It has a stiff and heavy texture along with a distinctive, strong flavor. Some will cook this with mead. Ueyn-ei-det-Vaar are deep-fried young pidgeons threaded onto string. It literally means "thieves in a row." Some vendors serve this with a bonus of fried pidgeon eggs. Supper Mid-Eve